Lost Mine of Phandelver for bigger party

[stitchlipped]

Hi all!

I'll be starting Lost Mine of Phandelver this weekend, with a party of 6 or possibly 7.

Since the starter set comes with 5 pregens, I can only assume that this could put the balance out of whack a little bit.

Has anyone run this adventure for a larger party that can give me some advice based on their experiences? Any thoughts about tweaks I can make to keep the challenge level up?

[Fwiffo86]

Hi all!

I'll be starting Lost Mine of Phandelver this weekend, with a party of 6 or possibly 7.

Since the starter set comes with 5 pregens, I can only assume that this could put the balance out of whack a little bit.

Has anyone run this adventure for a larger party that can give me some advice based on their experiences? Any thoughts about tweaks I can make to keep the challenge level up?

Create characters as per normal. If you are not using the pregens, use the backgrounds they have because they are tied directly to the adventure.

When going with encounters, add the appropriate amount of monsters for each encounter to account for the additional party members.

In the case of single monster encounters, instead of raising damage, add a couple of cohorts. That worked easiest for me.

[Spacehamster]

From what I have read the campaign is very hard as it is so might not even be needed to do any changes, maybe one more monster here and there if first parts feels to easy?

[Tenmujiin]

From what I have read the campaign is very hard as it is so might not even be needed to do any changes, maybe one more monster here and there if first parts feels to easy?

You are thinking of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. LMoP is incredibly easy and the group I'm dming for has cleared most of it with 2-3 people and our rogue soloed 1/2 of two of the dungeons until he failed around 20 perception checks in a row and got 1 shot by an ochre ooze. Our light cleric managed to 1 shot about 4 rooms of goblins at lv3.

So yea, having 6-7 people would make this adventure super easy (to the point of being boring). I can't help much with ideas to make it harder though since its 2:20 in the morning.

[Dralnu]

I'd recommend plugging in encounters in this calculator:
http://asmor.com/5e/monsters/#/main

If you want to increase the difficulty of an encounter, add weak monsters to the calculator until you hit the desired difficulty.

[stitchlipped]

Thanks all,

@Dralnu - that calculator is super useful.

What I've decided to do is figure out how many monsters I need to add to adjust each encounter, but decide whether I need to adjust every encounter on the fly depending on how easily the party handled the last few.

[infinitetech]

well it is an abandoned mine... so... back to gen one tricks... ALL HAIL the Giant Fire Beatles, may their all illuminating light burn away the impure!!!

seriously though, fire beetles as they always have make for great ways to fill the gaps, and they infest mines once they were abandoned, just plug a few extra in and see where the math comes out, in addition to other enemies they actually can be a threat and the glowing glands they drop make for good early game farming loot, in past games i've tamed fire beetles and made bug farms to get a slow income and very useful items (got to love grow-able glow sticks that are brighter than a torch)

plus they make good random encounter trash when combined with centipedes, spiders, or other bugs of various forms

[brocadecity]

One thing about that adventure is that it contains a whole lot of traps/negative consequences that are triggered by non stealthy parties (the flooding in the first cave, the rat in the redbrand hideout). Being 7 people, it's going to be hard not to trigger those. You could also make the nothic a little more agro in the redbrand hideout.